El Nino a phenomenon with opportunities: learning history and valuing community assets for an empowering digital curriculum in northern Peru

"A phenomenon with opportunities" expands the reach and enhances the impact of a prize-winning, on-line, educational innovation in environmental storytelling about the El Niño Phenomenon (ENP). This initiative was piloted in June 2019 as part of participatory qualitative data collection for AHRC project "Fishing and Farming in the Desert?

A Platform for Understanding el Niño Foods System Opportunities in the Context of Climate Change in Sechura, Peru", and in response to COVID-19 restrictions on face-to-face, in person teaching in Peru. On-going research is exploring how livelihoods in poor communities have historically taken advantage of ENP rains and temporary lagoons that form in the Sechura desert. "A phenomenon with opportunities" targets secondary school students in Sechura province (northern Peru), where 61.9% of the population live in poverty.

Here, the state has identified low education rates as a key dimension of poor levels of social inclusion (MIDIS 2013). Working with Peruvian NGO collaborator PRISMA, the Unidad de Gestión Educativa ([UGEL]: Sechura School Board) and a desert secondary school, Instituto Educacional Daniel Alcides Carrión, storytelling training will develop on-line, digital, and research skills for a cohort of 115 students and scale-up this experience to impact curriculum development for 154 schools and 21,059 students in the wider Sechura area.

In so doing, it addresses urgent concerns about the unequal impacts of COVID-19 on learning opportunities globally. The findings and province-wide experience will be reflected upon with leading national education stakeholders via a Lima-based workshop to generate national dialogue. By conducting their own inter-generational research about El Niño, its history and livelihoods impacts, young people will learn about the cross-cutting economic, cultural and social dimensions of climate related challenges.

Through tailored on-line training, students' research projects will reflect on the desert-El Niño food system and its management, including the often less-visible roles played by women. In this way students will absorb understandings of equitable resilience for their futures, as they themselves transition through their teenage years into adulthood.

To widen impact and engage a broader public, new partnerships led by PRISMA with the local museum and heritage sector will take the project's participatory practices and outcomes beyond school platforms. Museums have great potential to serve and catalyse sustainable development agendas. Yet this potential remains untapped in many provincial, non-metropolitan contexts like the arid regions of northern Peru.

PRISMAs partnership with the Municipality of Sechura, an existing "Fishing and Farming in the Desert" project collaborator, will enable work with the Ethnographic Museum and Ecological Park, linking students' storytelling with museum artefacts digitisation. These will be curated for public outdoor learning and become focal points for inter-generational sharing and exposition.

Through a strategic partnership with the Royal Geographical Society, curriculum development will also target an international audience, generating a bi-lingual interactive web resource on El Niño, animated by storytelling and digital imagery produced by Sechura students and targeted at secondary and primary students in Peru and the UK. Aligned with national curricula requirements in both settings the project has the potential to generate a unique model of international curriculum dialogue grounded in equitable partnerships.

The voices of the provincial, marginal, desert communities, and even less the children who grow up in them, are seldom heard in development forums. By bringing desert-El Niño livelihoods experiences to light, across generations and internationally, this impact and engagement project will raise awareness of the importance of local knowledge and help insert ENP into policy agendas as 'a Phenomenon with Opportunities'.